His engagement with literary works as a pieces of art, his creation of new myths and reworking of old myths, his study of linguistic change, and his creation of new languages, complete with patterns of phonological and semantic change, all reflect both his longing for the past and his vision of the world--both his fiction world and the real world in which he lived--as a story that does not come to an end, but is ever-changing in accordance with its creator's design.

Even when a term that resolves the problem of negative semantic change appears to have been found, this victory is short-lived, and the new, neutral word eventually enters into circulation and is used by bullies as an insult.

The only criterion that seems to be operationally usable derives from the assumption made above: if both phonetic and semantic change occurred in relatively small steps, feature by feature, component by component, then the likelihood that a hypothesis might be correct can be said to be supported in a more than subjective way.

Intellectually attracted to an intricate form of reasoning deeply associated with the Jesuits, yet in Pseudo-Martyr using it to attack them, Donne worked on the threshold of, and perhaps contributed to, semantic change.

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